


the general is also a mother

by Archangel_Beth



Category: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Genre: Gen, Heroic Sacrifices, Watsonian explanations, equal exchange, references to other fic premises without credit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:54:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22232863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archangel_Beth/pseuds/Archangel_Beth
Summary: Doylistically, we know why Leia died in Rise of Skywalker. ('Scuse me, gonna be crying about Carrie Fisher now.)Doylistically, Kylo Ren is redeemed because... I dunno, the media prioritizes redemption arcs for cute villains, and it mirrors the Vader redemption?Watsonianly, if we go back to the MMO,Star Wars: The Old Republic? Oh, this all makessensenow. This makessense. Let's do this.The general is also a mother.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	the general is also a mother

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sith_shenanigans](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sith_shenanigans/gifts).



_If you are reading this on an app with in-app purchases or subscriptions, know that this story is available at https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archangel_Beth , and Archive Of Our Own ("AO3") permits epub downloads; I like the Marvin app for iOS; small one-time fee, and lovely by-author sorting. If you have paid money for this story, you have been cheated._

* * *

* * *

_The general is also a mother._

You can't be Force-sensitive, carry a Force-sensitive child beneath your heart, and not retain a link. A sense of that child, even when darkness clouded it. Twisted it.

She'd always known there was something pulling at her child, her Ben. She'd known, even when he turned away from her brother's teachings... She'd blamed Snoke.

But the link persisted. How could it not?

And then Snoke died, and the link? Something still twisted there. The darkness wove itself through the other end. She told herself she should give up hope. (And yet, when had she ever given up hope, truly?)

It was only when the broadcasts came that she began to wonder. They were a taunt, a dare, a _find me if you can_. Meant, presumably, for the First Order's leader. And yet...

_Jump back._

Naboo was colonized by humans with only a veneer of society. Criminals, mobsters, thieves, murderers, con artists. They made treaties with the native species, who concealed their own intricate and sometimes deadly politics beneath the façade of still waters.

Decades and centuries gave the humans their own façade. Their own camouflages, disguises, diversions. Their monarchs and attendants, able to play the shellgame of protection. (And able to step into the role in truth, should a monarch fall? Probably. There are stories told of a queen where every meeting was a different person, whose specialty was under discussion.)

But their monarchs _did_ learn that danger was everywhere, and the only way to avoid it was to become as deadly as possible themselves.

Naboo's imprint cannot be erased in a single generation.

And the drive to understand, to untangle, to reconcile what Leia _knows_ in her heart with what the evidence presents -- that's not just a mother's bias. (A mother's bias is certainly involved, but she is capable of being ruthless as well, when her instincts tell her there's no other way.)

If Palpatine is, somehow, against all reports...

What if the twisting of her child's soul, that once she ascribed to Snoke whispering in his mind for years, was from some other whispers? Snoke came from _nowhere_ , a member of a species rare or unknown. Who taught _him_?

Accept the impossible, and many things fall into place.

So while she's training a new Jedi, Leia is meditating. Turning her mind to a link that -- all talk of burning the past notwithstanding -- can't be broken so long as she refuses to cast it away.

Turns her mind to the tendrils that weave around it, sink into it, binding and poisoning and _hiding_.

Though a child of Naboo himself, Palpatine never truly understood his heritage. He thought he had taken on the mantle of the Sith, when he arranged his family's death. (So tragic, so tragic.) He turned to the darkness and never once allowed himself to see how much of it was shaped by the dappled history of a planet and a people.

He always underestimated Padmé Amidala. He always underestimated Leia Organa. They let themselves have families, after all, and that was a weakness.

(Perhaps.)

So a mother's bond, a mother's prying and poking, is easily ignored. She cannot bring Ben Solo to the light alone; he's had too much time to work on the boy, and while he feels ghostly fingers digging into the roots of his shaping, he can spare the effort to resist them.

_A general knows when to strike._

A moment of distraction. A moment of danger. A moment when Ben himself can't spare the time to resist what he thinks is meddling instead of repair.

And a moment of brilliant sacrifice, when ghostly fingers become fire, and tear away the coils that shaped and poisoned a man's soul. The power is the Force, raw, and the liminal grasp as the general, the spy, the princess, the mother begins to drag Palpatine towards dissolution within it.

No living being could unwind all that careful brainwashing in an instant.

But in an instant, Leia is no living being.

***

_It's not enough, even so. The boy, terrified by his uncle's fear, is still there to be rejected. But even an angry, frightened, semi-trained Jedi..._

_Well. Sometimes you heal your enemy not just because of conflicted feelings, but because it's **what a Jedi would do.**_

_And then you steal his ship and leave him there, because Jakku doesn't teach mercy._

_And the daughters of Naboo, however far from those still waters they may be, rarely stop fighting._


End file.
